Professor EmeritusBenjamin Oldroyd

Bees I am primarily interested in behavioural genetics and the evolution of social behaviour. Almost all of my research has been on honey bees, Asian honeybees (check out my book below) and Australian native stingless bees Tetragonula and Austroplebia.

I started out as a quantitative geneticist, working on practical problems of bee breeding and bee health. I then got involved with the population genetics of Africanized bees in central America, part of a research team trying to stop the Killer Bees from invading the United States.

After that I began working on the mechanisms by which social cohesion is maintained in bee colonies. In particular, I bred a unique strain of bees in which workers laid male-destined eggs with high frequency. These mutant 'anarchistic' bees provided a superb resource for investigating the mechanisms by which worker sterility is maintained in normal social insect colonies.

Sticking with the theme of weird honey bees, I switched from Anarchistic bees to Cape honey bees around 2010. Cape bees are a population of honey bees confined to the southern provinces of South Africa. Cape bees are profoundly weird since unmated workers lay eggs that develop as females by parthenogenesis. This gives Cape bee workers unique life choices. If they can lay an egg in a queen cell they can be genetically reincarnated as a queen. They exploit this ability to the hilt, flying into other colonies and parasitizing queen cells (the place where queens are reared) with their eggs. We also showed that there is a population of Cape bees that infests the commercial bee population of northern South Africa. This population behaves like a transmissible social cancer that spreads from hive to hive, eventually taking over and killing the host queen. Remarkably, we showed that the population of millions of workers spread across thousands of colonies is all descended from a single Cape worker bee that lived in 1990. We even identified the gene that causes the parthenogenesis. .

Epigenetics

Playing around with bees inexorably draws one to the field of epigenetics: how can a queen and a worker be derived from genetically identical egg? It is therefore unsurprising that my latest projects have focussed on understanding how epigenetics contributes to evolution, not just in bees, but across the tree of life. I’ve drawn this work together in a popular science book: Beyond DNA: How Epigenetics is Transforming our Understanding of Evolution, to be published by Melbourne University Press in late 2023.